A regional workshop on Climate Change Prediction/Projection and Extreme Events Indices in the Arab Region was held from 13 to 16 March 2012 in Casablanca, Morocco and organized by ESCWA in collaboration with the League of Arab States (LAS) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and hosted by the Direction de la Meteorologie Nationale (DMN) of Morocco. The workshop was conducted as part of the Regional Initiative for the Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on Water Resources and Socio-Economic Vulnerability in the Arab Region, through a project supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).

The purpose of the four-day training workshop is to build the capacity of experts from national meteorological offices in the Arab region in the field of climate monitoring, assessment, prediction/projection and knowledge management of regional climate conditions and climate indices including those representing extreme events.

The workshop addressed various subjects such as overview of the past, present and future climate of the Arab region, climate data availability, quality control of daily data and deriving of indices from the daily data. The participants of the workshop were engaged in hands-on training in analyzing climatic data of one station from each country and compiled extreme weather events indices using standardized software based on the guidance provided.

The outputs of the country reports were presented by the participants and showed changes in trends of temperature and precipitation climate indices and highlighted problems associated with data quality and homogeneity. The last day of the workshop was devoted to climate prediction and projection for the Arab region including the delineation of the Arab Domain for climate modeling, latest developments in the climate change projections for the Arab region and analysis of extreme indices in climate model simulations.